Captain October, the evil Sigil-Bearer, has captured Samantha Rey and the crew of the pirate ship El Cazador. Sam’s efforts to master her own Sigil and her time-traveler’s knowledge of the future may be all that helps her crew escape and beat October to the mysterious treasure of Blackjack Tom.

This book has gotten better as it progresses. Sam is coming into her own as a character, and the things we learn about her world are intriguing. This is one of the things that always disappointed me about the demise of the original CrossGen comics – we never got to learn the grand scheme behind the sigils, how they worked, why they were given to different characters across the cosmos, and so forth. I don’t know how much, if any, of that original concept has survived in the new Marvel-CrossGen comics, but at the very least, it seems Mike Carey is going to avoid the danger of another dangling mystery by revealing at least some of it early. That’s highly appreciated.

Leonard Kirk and Patrick Olliffe, both of whom have done great work with young, female heroes in the past, trade off halves of this book. The transition is pretty seamless – you can’t tell where one artist ends and the next begins, although it may help that Pat Davidson’s inks begin a few pages before Olliffe takes over the pencils.

I’m looking forward to the conclusion. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this book at first, but it’s grown on me quite a bit.